Disability, Culture, and Society

Founded
2015

Seminar Number
779

This seminar provides a venue for scholars working in disability studies—which examines the social, political, cultural, and historical factors that define disability—to interrogate the current state of the field and identify the most crucial problems and concerns for its future. Critical scholarship around disability questions is essential because it builds a platform to interrogate charged ethical and political questions about the meaning of aesthetics and cultural representation, identity, and dynamics of social inclusion and/or exclusion. Over the past 15 years, disability studies has grown into a vibrant interdisciplinary arena, engaging some of the most pressing debates of our time: questions about the beginning and end of life, prenatal testing, abortion, euthanasia, eugenics; definitions of mental health and wellness; accommodation in schools, public transportation, and the workplace; technologies for the medical correction and “cure” of the non-normative body; disease, wartime injuries, post-traumatic stress, and healthcare.

Abstract

In Authoring Autism Melanie Yergeau defines neurodivergence as an identity—neuroqueerness—rather than an impairment. Using a queer theory framework, Yergeau notes the stereotypes that deny autistic people their humanity and the chance to define themselves while also challenging cognitive studies scholarship and its reification of the neurological passivity of autistics. She also critiques early intensive behavioral interventions—which have much in common with gay conversion therapy—and questions the ableist privileging of intentionality and diplomacy in rhetorical traditions. Using storying as her method, she presents an alternative view of autistic rhetoricity by foregrounding the cunning rhetorical abilities of autistics and by framing autism as a narrative condition wherein autistics are the best-equipped people to define their experience. Contending that autism represents a queer way of being that simultaneously embraces and rejects the rhetorical, Yergeau shows how autistic people queer the lines of rhetoric, humanity, and agency. In so doing, she demonstrates how an autistic rhetoric requires the reconceptualization of rhetoric’s very essence.

Abstract

This book introduces the human development model to define disability and map its links with health and wellbeing, based on Sen's capability approach. The model is applied using panel survey data with internationally comparable questions on disability for Ethiopia, Malawi, Tanzania and Uganda. It gives evidence on the prevalence of disability and its strong and consistent association with multidimensional poverty, mortality, economic insecurity, morbility, low education attainment and employment rates. It shows that disability is related to aging, gender, health and poverty. Ultimately, this book calls for inclusion and prevention interventions as solutions to the deprivations associated with impairments and health conditions.

Abstract

Disability studies and critical animal studies, two of today’s most rapidly emergent fields of literary criticism, have both faced critiques of overwhelming whiteness. In addition to their largely white canons, both fields have at times characterized African-American writers and activists as being largely invested in distancing blackness from disability and animality. While these two categories have indeed functioned as primary justificatory rhetorics for anti-black racism, and the struggle for racial equality has aimed to dispel dehumanizing figures of nonwhite people as “defective” or “subhuman,” I see the early twentieth century as a crucial complicating moment in which black authors modeled the possibility of resisting dehumanization without foreclosing affiliations across categories of ability and species. This paper will examine Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God as a prime example of this negotiation, in which humans’ affinities with sick and disabled animals attend Hurston's most notable aesthetic experiments. Through this formal affiliation, Hurston's work suggests that a capacious disability and interspecies politics is necessary to resist the dehumanization of rural African-American cultural production.